Week 13: The Future of Open Education

Week 15: Wrap Up

Blog your overall feelings about the course. On the content side, what did you learn? How will you use it after the class is over? What did we not cover that you realize now we really should have? On the process side, wow could the class be better next time it’s taught? What would you change? What would you keep?

Education level is constantly presented as one of the principal determinants of economic growth, yet Easterly finds little empirical evidence for this correlation.

The author shows that in Africa, education level of the 90’s are much higher than those in the 70’s, yet efforts to achieve economic growth in this region of the world have failed in the majority of the cases.

One of the reasons Easterly puts forth is that advances in education must be accompanied by adequate productive capital and the capacity to absorbe new technologies. The author points out that the supply of knowledge is higher than the demand and cannot be absorbed.

My points: I was rather impressed by the fact that Friedman identifies three broad categories of workers who will have job security in the flat world. Synthesizers, explainers, versatilists and explores the “right stuff”that the educational requirements need to survive in the flattened world. He recommends building right-brain skills, or those that cannot be duplicated by a computer. Friedman believes that globalization serves more to enrich and preserve culture than to destroy it, as each person is given their own voice and vehicle of expression through podcasts, websites and so on.

QUESTIONS: What can the open education movement learn from the book you chose to read? Elaborate on at least three points. Which of the ideas presented in the book did you find hardest to believe or agree with? Why?

My three points from Free Culture come along with Lessig’s refrain:

1. Creativity and innovation always builts on the past

2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builts on it

3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the power of the past

Estabilished companies have an interest in excluding future competitors and claim for extentions of copyright from copying copies to derivate works mainly because of technology.

QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?)

QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently missing that would benefit the open education movement? As the CC and GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed with Wikipedia content? Some people claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these people mean, are they right, and why? Is copyleft good for the open education movement? Why or why not?

QUESTIONS: Understanding the importance and value of the public domain, how much (what percentage) of this value would you estimate is realized when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license? To what degree would the open educational resources movement (and therefore the world) be additionally benefited if OERs were simply placed in the public domain? Please explain.

Learning online is one of the great advantages of information technology. This unit will help you establish a safe and comfortable working environment to ensure that your study time at the computer screen does not impact on your health. It also looks at the basic skills for online study, such as file management and installing software.

What does Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus tell us about the author and the time at which the play was written? This unit will help you to discover the intricacies of the play and recognise how a knowledge of the historical and political background of the time can lead to a very different understanding of the author’s intended meaning.

Both are topics of my interest as I’m a teacher of English Literature using a blended learning approach in my personal Moodle. What I’m presentely doing is just re-writing the material offered for a more interactive approach adding other moodle resources and activities.

QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does “quality” mean?

I’m not going to answer the questions direcly as my detailed analysis of the websites has not been completed yet. In the process I’ve been adopting the point of view of a teacher looking for interesting teaching material. Once I found some material of interest I stopped and checked pros and cons.

I found a couple of courses (Living with the Internet and Marlowe) worth analyzing in detail. However I have to admit to have been quite partial in the chioce: I’ve been working in Moodle since a long time with my students and found the delivery quite familiar. They are well designed and efficacious in the communicative mode.